Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 936: Rat’s war(2)

Mavius jerked awake to the muffled roar of shouting beyond the thin walls of his sleeping quarters. Even through the haze of sleep, he recognized the words being carried through the corridors like a rising storm tide: Enemy! Enemy! The cries were panicked, disordered, layered with the metallic clatter of men scrambling into armor and boots.

The Fingers was no sprawling city with distant districts and roomy avenues, it was a fortress, a cluster of stone and timber crammed into a narrow span of rock. Everything lay close to everything else. The Imperator’s chambers were scarcely a bowshot from the inner fortifications, and when thousands of throats screamed danger at once, the stone itself seemed to pulse with it.

No one slept through that.

His mind went instantly to the worst possibilities. He would never confess it aloud, not to his generals, not to his guards, not even to his priest which he really didn’t have, but each time a report of trouble reached him his first thought was always the same: What has the Fox of Yarzat devised now?

The memory of the battle still gnawed at him. Alpheo had unraveled his strongest flank with a trick so stupid that the shame of it still burned when he remembered the banners falling, the horses bolting, the stunned look of his lords who expected the sweet ambrosia of conquest, and were only given mud.

The siege had tormented him in its own fashion. For a week, he had been fed comforting news, failed assaults, enemy losses, signs that the besiegers were faltering. He had allowed himself to believe it. To breathe easier. To think that perhaps the enemy had run out of momentum after all.

And then the wall had collapsed beneath their feet, proving him wrong in the bubble he .

That moment had shattered the fragile shell of confidence he’d built around himself. Now, as shouts echoed and boots thundered outside his door, the same questions rose like bile in his throat. What new treachery now? Had the enemy forced a gate open? Was another betrayal blooming within his walls? Had they slipped inside just as Willos had done a decade ago?

Should he flee? Should he mount his horse and ride north before the noose tightened? And where was his wife, why had she taken so long? Why had no riders come with news of her progress? Why was everything so uncertain?

Anxiety piled upon anxiety until his heart hammered against his ribs as though trying to escape.

A sudden crash rattled the door.

"Your Imperial Majesty! Are you unharmed?" someone shouted from the other side, voice strained with fear.

For a desperate heartbeat, Mavius feared assassins had found him in his sleep. But the tone told him otherwise. Relief swept through him so sharply it left him momentarily speechless.

The guard mistook that silence for catastrophe. He rammed the door open, stumbling inside with sword half-drawn, only to freeze when he saw Mavius alive and upright. Relief softened his features for barely an instant before it twisted again, this time into horror.

Only then did Mavius realize his face was bare. Instinctively, he snatched the mask from beneath his pillow, where he always kept it, and fastened it over his features, the cold metal pressing against still-warm skin.

"What is happening?" he demanded as he rose from the bed, suddenly aware that anything could have unfolded while he slept. Perhaps his brother’s entire host was at this very moment marching through the dawn mist toward the inner gates, coming for his head.Why couldn’t anything go his way?

"There has been an enemy presence inside the fortress, Your Imperial Maj—" the guard began, but Mavius cut him off.

"They’re coming here?" he asked, voice cracking with panic as he reached for the sword resting beside the bed.

"No..no, Majesty. They were not soldiers. They were spies. They attempted to burn our tunnels... no doubt hoping to trigger a second collapse."

"Did they succeed?" Mavius asked. He had not felt any tremors, but he no longer trusted his own senses. Hope made men deaf. Fear made them fools.

The guards exchanged a glance, brief but telling.

Mavius saw all he needed in that look.They did not succeed.

"Is there immediate danger at this moment?" he pressed.

"No, Your Imperial Majesty," the lead guard answered, though his voice shook faintly.

"Then take me there," Mavius said, tightening the straps of his mask, as if the cold metal might lend him the courage he lacked

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Mavius stood before the ruined intersection of his tunnels, staring at the churned earth as if it were some insults to him personally . What had once been a cleanly cut crossroad was now a suffocating heap of half-charred wood and collapsed dirt. The torchlight made the dust glitter like powdered bone.

He could not tell how deep the damage ran. For all he knew, half their work had been undone. Days of labor? A week? It was impossible to estimate how far the sabotage extended when the tunnel mouths were still coughing out smoke like dying lungs.

And beneath it all, an even darker uncertainty gnawed at him: he had no way of knowing how close the enemy miners were. None. The endless racket outside, the peasants hammering steel plates and driving pipes into the ground under his brother’s orders, drowned any instruments they could have used. The whole earth trembled with that infernal pounding. Even if Alpheo himself was digging directly beneath Mavius’s feet, the ground would reveal nothing.

He had no means to silence them. The besiegers kept cavalry outside at all hours; to send men out to kill the noisy peasants would be to feed his soldiers to the wolves. Either the cavalry would sweep through the breach and into the fortress, or the sortie would be butchered to the last man. And for what? To kill a handful of starving villagers with hammers?

His brother had peasants enough to replace those by the thousand. Mavius did not.

"How," he growled, voice sharpening under the mask, "did they manage to get inside? Were the guards drunk? Asleep? Dead?!"

Lord Willios who had come to oversee the incident, bowed his head slightly, eyes flicking toward the bodies laid out on the ground. At a gesture, soldiers stepped forward and dragged the corpses away by the ankles, leaving dark smears on the stone. "We are... uncertain, Your Grace. But if I were to offer a theory, I would wager they entered dressed as miners assigned to our tunnels. Once inside, they slew the real workers and tried to collapse the passages."

It was conjecture, but a convincing one. The only gate they could have slipped through was the inner one, the entrance that connected the fortress with the villages from his domain. He had allowed many of those villagers inside to bolster the workforce. They must have hidden themselves among them.

Mavius felt his stomach twist. I let them in.

"And yet they failed,how?" he said stiffly, refusing to let the thought settle.

Willios exhaled through his teeth, the heavy smell of burned wood and blood making his nose wrinkle. "A scream was heard by soldiers patrolling nearby. When they approached, they saw smoke rising from the tunnel mouths. They rushed to put the fire out. Whatever the spies intended, they were stopped before the worst could happen. The scream may have come from a miner who witnessed the killings before they did it to him."

Mavius felt nothing at the stench. He could no longer smell anything through the mask.

"And the infiltrators?" he asked. "I suppose we did not catch them." 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Willios shook his head. "When the guards reached the crossroads, they found no one there but the dead."

"Then find them," Mavius said, icy calm slipping into his tone. "Drag whatever knowledge you can out of them. If they’re not caught, they’ll try again in a week, and the next time the tunnels will fall."

Willios hesitated, then cleared his throat. "Your Imperial Majesty... if I may?"

"Speak."

"I believe their aim was not to collapse the wall."

Mavius turned on him sharply, regarding him as though he had taken leave of his senses. "Oh? Then what? Were they trying to roast meat down there for a late supper?"

Willios did not flinch. "Your Grace, wood does not burn easily in confined tunnels. Not without oil. They had none, only torches. And as you can see, they threw those torches at the joints between our passageways, not toward the wall bracing. If they intended to bring down the wall itself, they could not have accomplished it with what they carried.They needed time for the flame to eat everything"

Mavius understood at once

"They weren’t trying to collapse our wall," he said slowly, voice dropping. "They were trying to stop us from digging any further by aiming at the intersection."

"Yes, Your Grace," Willios answered. "That is my guess too."

Mavius turned his head toward the outer walls, where the faint echo of hammering still quivered through the stone.

"Those bastards pounding on their pipes," he murmured. "Are they clustered more heavily near this sector than elsewhere?"

Willios closed his eyes briefly, piercing together recent observations. He opened them again with a grim nod.

"It appears so."

"They are making their push here!" Mavius roared, the sound echoing off the stone like a blow struck against a shield. "They had no intetion of collapsing the wall , they struck only to blind us, to halt our digging before we draw within reach of theirs! Only the gods know how close they already are to make this move. They could be a hand’s breadth beneath our feet, and we would hear nothing."

His fist tightened until leather creaked. "Triple the miners in this direction. I want this entire sector turned inside out. If the enemy intends to grope their way blindly toward us, then we will claw twice as fast toward them. Let this place become a rabbit’s warren if it must, but I will not have us outdug by a pack of foxes."

Willios bowed, fist to chest. "It will be done, Your Imperial Majesty."

"And find the spies," Mavius said, voice hardening into something colder than rage. "They are still inside these walls...they must be. There is no path out. Hunt them through every corridor, every storeroom, every cellar. I want them dragged from whatever hole they’ve crawled into."

Willios lifted his gaze, hesitation flickering in his eyes. "Your Imperial Majesty... there are more than four hundred laborers from the surrounding villages currently within the fortress. Sifting through them all will take time. Some have been here for weeks, some arrived only yesterday. We may—"

Mavius turned his head slowly, the movement deliberate enough to make the torches’ light shiver across his mask. "Have you gone soft, my lord?" he asked, and though his tone never rose above a murmur, it carried an icy finality that stilled even the soldiers nearby. "I do not care how many you hang. I do not care how many you flog, break, or bleed. Peasants can be replaced by the cartload. What cannot be replaced is the knowledge those spies carry and whatever rot they have already planted beneath us."

Willios swallowed.

"There may be more among them," Mavius continued, faint like a whisper from a crypt. "More we have not yet seen. More who wait for a moment of quiet to strike at us again. You will find them. Even if it costs fifty innocents for one traitor, you will find them."

He stepped closer, until he stood so near that Willios could see his own reflection warped in the metal of the Imperator’s mask.

"You have my permission," Mavius said, each word falling with the weight of iron dropped into water, "and my blessing... to do whatever is necessary to accomplish your mission. I am sure you won’t sadden me with new of your failure...I have received enough of those.’’